Work Engagement in the Third Sector

Abstract

It has been assumed that third-sector organizations attract ideologically oriented employees. Therefore, employees consider their work as more meaningful. However, employees’ ideological orientation has not been taken into account in previous studies on work engagement. With this in mind, the present study sets out to apply an extended job demand-resources (JD-R) model in a survey conducted with Finnish third-sector employees (N = 1,412). The results showed that third-sector employees report higher work engagement than employees generally in the work engagement studies. In addition to job demands and resources, work engagement is associated with public service motivation and value congruence. Thus, public service motivation theory offers more insight into third-sector employees’ work engagement than the conventionally used JD-R model.